Armed Struggle

An Interview with Joelle Aubron

Born in 1959, Joelle Aubron is a former Action Directe
political prisoner. Action Directe was a communist guerilla organization
active in France in the 1980s. AD grew out of the French autonomist scene,
drew heavy inspiration from both the struggles of the Third World proletariat
and the intellectual legacy of the new communist currents of the 1960s and
70s. It carried out a number of spectacular attacks, many of which were in
cooperation with Germany's Red Army Faction. Aubron was arrested in February
1987, along with fellow Action Directe members Jean-Marc Rouillan and Natalie
Menignon.

On June 16th 2004, at the age of 44, Aubron released from prison on health
grounds - she is suffering from cancer. (According to French law, those suffering
terminal illnesses can be released to die at home.) "The liberation of my
comrades is a battle still being waged," she said, as she left the prison.

This interview was carried out by the anarcho-punk webzine Future Noir ( http://futurenoir.propagande.org ) over the period 2002-2003. It was translated from French to English by
Kersplebedeb. Footnotes with numbers are from the original, footnotes with
letters in square parentheses are for context, and provided by Kersplebedeb.

INTERVIEW WITH JOELLE AUBRON
of ACTION DIRECTE

1) How was AD structured? Was it just one section that
was devoted to armed struggle or was AD an armed organization plain and
simple?

AD did not have legal and armed sections, any more than it was represented
by a political party. Political and military unity was a necessary precondition
to guerilla action. It is no simple matter to explain everything that led
to this unity.

We did not start out from point A in order to reach point B. There were
many factors that led us to take up the strategic weapon of armed struggle,
to apply it in the imperialist metropoles [a1 ], and it was not a linear progression. The activity of the guerilla on
this continent did not consist of a pre-planned method. There was no rulebook
telling us how to do it.

We inherited the past and invented the present in an explosive mixture
of breaks and continuities. The easiest thing would be to give an example
with a key concept: workers’ autonomy.

The question of workers’ autonomy, as a class for itself and also as a
movement to abolish all classes, is at the heart of communist history. And
within this movement to abolish the existing order, to abolish classes, I
include those anarchists who also demand this emancipation. From the Paris
Commune to contemporary struggles, the form and the appearance of this autonomous
class action are themselves at the heart of the disagreements between communists
and anarchists.

And yet, I’m sure most people who grasped the new possibilities of the
sixties did not do so as a result of studying some book. This apprach and
historical awareness was “naturally” available in the atmosphere of those
times. We were rooted in history. Within the French State, from the Maoists
to LIP [a ] to the struggles of immigrant workers, this autonomy was not limited to
the autonomist movement of the late seventies. As a result of the sixties,
the idea of the Communist Party being the vanguard once and for all, as
it had been understood since 1917, was largely discredited. But it was not
a matter of liquidation and conversion to anarchist ideas. It was first
and foremost a process, practices, confrontations, experiments, new horizons.

It was a matter of what had happened to the Communist Parties that had
come out of the Third International; their inability to deal with many of
the aspects of class struggle that they had seen developing since 1945, specifically
in regards to the national liberation struggles (1 ). But it was just as much a matter of the return of a section of the ex-“New
Left”. After having distanced themselves from the old Communist Parties, the
far left parties played at being Iznogoud wanting to replace the Caliph [b ]. By the end of the seventies in Europe we were witnessing the farce of
their umpteenth ideological conquest of the masses, their quantitative gains
in their electoral carnivals, their keeping struggles contained within the
proper institutional channels. Realizing what a farce this was combined with
other realizatons.

One of these other things we realized was the role of institutional social
controls. This was not new; it was not really any different from the insurrectionary
position which criticized the idea that there would be a slow accumulation
of forces within ideological debates and trade union work. As early as the
1930s, Gramsci had identified the need for a new strategy to overcome the
preventive counter-revolutionary [c ] institutions that the bourgeoisie was developing to keep its monolopoly
of power.

But this need was also something that was accessible « in the air
» of the times. Subversion was everywhere, turning everything into an
opportunity for critical action and visions of how radically different things
could be. Daily activism consisted of occupations, violent demonstrations,
traditional activist mobilizations but also attacks and expropriations. This
produced a political situation in which revolutionary politics advanced on
two feet: the movement and the guerilla. It was action born of the realization
that a new kind of vanguard was needed in order to effectively “overthrow
all relationships that degrade, submit, subjugate, and destroy men and women”
[d ].

Realizations and facts that created dynamics which in turn opened up a
number of possibilities. “Our only real strength lies in the unity of comrades
in the factories, in the neighbourhoods, in the schools, in the offices;
a unity without insignia or membership cards, refusing all divisions that
threaten our true class unity; in other words, the revolutionary strategy.
From this unity comes the proletarian left, and only the proletarian left
can build, through struggle, the revolutionary organization.” (Sinistra
Proleraria, 1970 [e ]). The words and expressions were related to concrete situations, they
were based in reality. Our inspiration came from the classics, from Marx,
Engels, Lenin… but we also drew from Mao, Guevara and Frantz Fanon. Marxist
theory and the new theoretical advances coming out of the national liberation
struggles combined with and confronted each other. We drew on the Situationists
just before ’68 and we used Althusser to strengthen our analysis. This wasn’t
just an intellectual hobby. Taken by the ideas in a pamphlet, arguments fiercely
defended in a meeting, our references were made real in our practice.

And so it was from this happy mess that the practice of armed struggle
on this continent emerged – albeit with often major differences from one
guerilla group to another. A strategy of proletarian unity which implied
a break with institutional social controls.

Awareness of these controls was practically at the heart of this option.
And it was with Althusser that we unraveled how these structures relate
to each other: the economic base, the social and human relationships which
it produces, the State and the social and class bodies that it “autonomously”
creates, the political and cultural institutions and their impact on our
lives, how they represent us and our imaginations.

At this point, the situation at the end of the sixties made it painfully
obvious to what point things were contaminated by the preventive counter-revolution.
Practically everywhere around the world the working class’s political and
trade union organizations had abandoned their tasks. Of course, it wasn’t
the first time this had happened, for example in 1914 the social-democratic
parties had smashed the Second International on the alter of the bloodbath
that was the First World War. Nevertheless, what was new was the existence
of the guerilla option. This essentially came from the post-WW2 liberation
struggles in the three continents [f ].

Armed struggle – which had become a strategic tool of revolutionary counter-violence
– was the answer to the counter-revolutionary policies, to all the institutions,
to the collaboration of trade union and political organizations. We took
the idea of “protracted revolutionary warfare” from Mao and we adapted it
to our metropolitan realities. We gave up on the idea that a gradual accumulation
of forces should precede armed struggle “when the time is right” and instead
made guerilla activity an indispensable tool of revolutionary class war
right now, something that could destroy the system of global exploitation
and build an alternative social organization.

As opposed to waiting, to sending yet more delegations off to Vietnam,
guerilla activity elaborated a strong connection between the struggle today,
the critique/breaking point and the goal. Preparing revolutionary warfare
and insurrection is itself a politico-military activity. It is the war of
resistance, the counter-violence of revolutionaries confronting the brutality
of the exploitative and oppressive system.

After Genoa, I heard a demonstrater say to the media that “violence is
burying the future.” This kind of formula doesn’t mean anything, except
maybe that one is brain-dead. The system’s own violence is seen as natural
and under control. Even though all societies may try to claim that violence
is an external problem, and may develop different rituals – sometimes themselves
very violent – in order to keep it out, in the present situation where 358
personal fortunes greater than one billion dollars represent the equivalent
annual income of 45% of the world population, that is to say 2,3 billion
people, more than ever one has to refer back to the semantic difference
Genet underlined in 1977 between “violence” and “brutality”. [g ]

This example alone exposes the alienating procedure in which the spectacle
of protest is trapped. The basic facts of who has the power are denied,
erased from the picture. The ability to perceive reality is blocked by words
whose meaning has been lost. The concrete conditions of the system’s structural
brutality are - at most – condemned, but not fought against.

The ATTAC [h ] and other citizens’ groups pretend to be renewing the content of formal
democracy, such as it developed since the 19th century. Yet regardless of
what social or political rights may have been won as a result of very bitter
struggles within the framework of that idea, the relationship between capital,
labour and the State, the framework and the rules of that “democracy”, are
already the result of the capitalist mode of production in all its vampiric
glory, sucking the blood of subject labour. By the 19th century this vampire
had already pretty much achieved in Europe the “expropriation of the mass
of the people from the soil [that] forms the basis of the capitalist mode
of production.” [Capital, Vol. 1, Part VIII, Chapter 33]. It then set out
to conquer other worlds where wage-labour was not yet the form of social
relations of production. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the vampire
is still living on the workers’ blood by two arteries: the one where it pumps
the blood of workers in the metropoles and the other one.

And yet this unity of the political and the military in no way meant that
we saw violence as the “motor force of history”. On the contrary, faced
with the institutionalalized, peaceful violence of the relationship between
capital and labour, the foundation of class society, we felt that counter-violence
would be a way of reclaiming moments of power for and with the oppressed.

At the end of the sixties the bourgeoisie was faced with a crisis of domination,
a crisis of the model of accumulation and of capitalist social relations,
and this raised the question of the oppressed taking power in a particularly
sharp way. At the same time, within the same movement, ideas of proletarian
internationalism and anti-imperialism were also being completely renewed.

2) What was the relationship between Action Directe
and the Red Army Faction?

The January 1985 joint text was the result of objective conditions, of
experiences and discussions. And also because revolutionary politics was
advancing on two feet – the movement and the guerilla – the experiences
and analyses were being discussed between the different components – the
guerilla itself, resistance groups, and groups organized around more specific
questions.

No matter what some idiots might have claimed, this text never spoke of
a merger of our two organizations. Not only did we keep our own names as well
as our own organizational structures, but if we officially decided our politico-military
campaigns together this meant that there was an ongoing discussion. “This
project, as an open process aiming at joint action, should smash the centers
of imperialist strategy because it is here that they must build themselves
up economically and militarily in order to maintain their global domination.”
(AD-RAF Joint Statement, 1985)

With the RAF, and also earlier with the Comunisti Organizzati per la Liberazione
Proletaria (2 ), we went beyond simply helping each other out occasionally as a form of
active solidarity, which was nothing unusual at the time. It was no longer
a question of just sharing explosives, guns, false IDs and money or even of
helping each other out with logistics. We were now attacking together.

In September 1988, at the opening of the bi-annual meeting of the World
Bank and the IMF in Berlin, the RAF attacked Hans Tietmeyer, Secretary of
State of the Federal Republic of Germany and delegate of the IMF and World
Bank at world economic summits. A joint statement from the RAF and the BR/pcc
[Italian Red Brigades] was attached to the communique from the Khaled Aker
Commando [i ]. It underlines how “the historical differences in political developments
and orientation… cannot and should not be an obstacle to the necessary unification
of different anti-imperialist struggles and activities in a conscious attack
against imperialist power.”

When discussing a process like this, there is always the risk of giving
a linear description. And the worst thing about such a description is that
it lends credibility to those who have repented and now regret having ever
dreamed of changing the world, those who now promote submission.

Nevertheless, a chronological list should be able to give some idea of
the combination of factors that allowed this step:

the profound renewal of internationalism and anti-imperialism which
was a fundamental part of the practice of armed struggle on this continent,

The strategic statement “The Guerilla, the Resistance and the Anti-Imperialist
Front”, published by the RAF in 1982. I will attach some extracts from this
long text.

The progress of the West European bloc and the consequences this
reactionary development held for the proletariat and the people of theThree
Continents.

These factors were not just added together to give a programmatic model.
They were inter-related, interacting with each other and with a host of
different practices. And it was all of this that together confronted the
bourgeois backlash.

Between 1979, when AD first made its appearance, and 1982, the balance
of power had already shifted, and not in our side’s favour. Without being
able to go into all of the different factors which played a part in this
change, I will simply state the end result: the bourgeoisie was on the offensive
again. War was declared on the people of the Three Continents, the new imperialist
strategy was clear at the “Versailles Summit” of the G7. A few weeks later,
the State of Israel launched “Operation Freedom for Galilee”, invading Lebanon
and carrying out massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps (3 ).

In the same way today everyone can see the connection between an unabashed
imperialism under the pretext of a “war against terrorism” and the Sharon
government’s attempt to finish off the Palestinian people once and for all.
And every oppressed people can see how this pretext serves the State which
oppresses them. And yet, it is not only a pretext. It is clear proof of
the relationship between freedom from capital and freedom from imperialism.
The more the capitalist means of production reaches the “genetic” limits
of its mode of development, the more brutal are its imperialist consequences.

The relationship between these two freedoms was always central to AD’s
strategy. In 1982, when the reality of the situation, of the way in which
the balance of power was shifting, showed the outline of this relationship,
we carried out the June and August campaigns: a strong mobilization against
the Versailles Summit, many operations including a spectacular attack on
the headquarters of the IMF and World Bank, attacks on Israeli and American
companies including the armed occupation of the headquarters of the Chase
Manhattan Bank.

And so, when faced with this situation, we still had a few cards up our
sleeve. The need for a practical critique of outdated forms of internationalism
showed the way for new paths of resistance. Starting from the existence of
guerilla politics across Western Europe, the RAF took on a project greater
than had been seen before.

But this project of a common front of the different forms of resistance
was itself part of a larger process. We outlined this in a text that was published
at the time of our May 1994 trial, under the title “From ‘Sympathy’ to Strategic
Convergence”:

“While the European question has hardly been looked at so far,
it will reveal itself in the course of the confrontation with the bourgeoisie
and the forces of reaction. And it is basically within this process that
one can find the beginning of the resolution […] To be a reference point
for the proletariat in a process of longterm social warfare, revolutionary
commitment must take into account all the realities of its age and, in the
first place, the tendency of the imperialist European bourgeoisie towards
integration and the weakening of the nation-state. The recomposition of the
proletariat depends on being able to go beyond institutionalized politics
and being able to represent the interests of the proletariat and its concrete
anti-imperialist solidarity with the proletarian and oppressed peoples around
the world. A process of unity based on the fundamental contradiction between
the international proletariat and the imperialist bourgeoisie. Since the
end of the 1970s, with the worstening crisis and the related greater tendency
towards war, both strategic convergence and an awareness of the obvious limits
of simply objective unity became possible. […]”

Seeing as the reactionary nature of the European entity is obvious to everyone
today, it can seem like no big deal to refer to it this way. But when I
quote what we wrote in 1994, I am quoting what we knew right from the beginning
of the 1980s. Whatever our errors and mistakes, we took this political responsibility
full on. And I am proud of it.

It goes without saying that the defeat we suffered shows our limits and
our errors. In retrospect, I have the impression that we, the guerilla and
other initiatives for revolutionary unity in Western Europe, were miles ahead
of ourselves. Sure we knew, practically speaking, the new nature of international
class warfare, but we were still far too voluntarist to be politically effective.
We did not realize to what extent we had entered into a defensive period
for the conquered and oppressed. Very conscious of the strength of the bourgeois
counter-offensive, we had a real sense of emergency, and yet we did not
quite grasp all of the ramifications of this counter-offensive. Of course
we saw the defeats, but we took them for unfortunate setbacks we had to
move beyond.

And this is particularly true for those of us in Action Directe. The coming
to power of the left after thirty years in opposition blinded us to the
extent to which critical ideas and practices had regressed. We took this
regression to be local and temporary.

The truth is, I am not very sure how accurate this evaluation is. We can
see today how cruel the effects of this counter-offensive are, especially
on the ideological and political levels, in the way in which people see
the world and how they feel they can act on it. But this remains only part
of the picture. The history of armed struggle on this continent has yet
to be written. Those of us who have still not given up on changing the world,
we cannot simply accept the ideological and political assumptions of bourgeois
historiography. Especially as concerns revolutionary counter-violence.

3) Action Directe was an anti-capitalist organization, but most of
your attacks were against the government. Why not target multinationals?
Wouldn’t you agree that governments are just the lapdogs of capitalism?

Ouch! It is painful to hear a question like that. Amongst the tools that
I use to understand reality in order to change it, there is a good dollop
of Marxist theory. And so that question is painful because the relationship
you seem to imply exists between multinational corporations and governments
seems to me to be one of the effects of the dominant ideology, “false consciousness
reflecting real conditions”.

Over the past years a certain nostalgia for the interventionist Welfare
State has taken root in activist circles. To summarize quickly, the belief
that the State should have the job of protecting the nation-state’s territory
from the effects of “free market” competition and its dogma of profits-at-any-price.
I am not going to go over the historic role of this State model, the complex
relationship that there was between different factors in that period of
capitalist development from, roughly, the 1930s to the 1980s. I will mention
just two, which are of central importance in that their interactions can
help us to understand the different levels of the socio-economic formations
of that historical period:

the development of a mode of accumulation where labour was tied
to Taylorist assembly line production and the consequences for the bourgeoisie
of the crisis of overproduction in the 1930s, namely what are commonly referred
to as Keynesian policies where a mass supply is associated with a mass demand.

a certain kind of class struggle which involved both the reality
of the mass worker, regimented by the assembly line in the big production
centres, the existence of an “alternative model” (4 ) and, consequently, the defensive posture adopted by the bourgeoisie, at
the same time as it was confronted with the national liberation struggles
in the periphery [j ].

To continue with another example, regarding the actions from 1984 on, it
is not a coincidence that before he was a specialist in mass layoffs, the
great technocrat George Besse [k ] was in charge of important French developments in an industry where there
is a direct connection between civilian and military applications; from the
Pierrelate factory to enrich uranium to the treatment of waste at The Hague
from which plutonium is produced. Nor was it a coincidence that Guy Brana
[l ], at the time the number two guy at the CNPF, spent most of his career
with the transnational corporation Thomson. Nationalized in 1981, this company
produced civilian and military high technology and was one of the major players
in the “Public Industrial Sector”, a war machine for the bourgeois offensive
going on at the time.

As in all imperialist countries, the monopolies and the State are obviously
the bourgeoisie’s main agents of class struggle. But in France their fusion
(the State’s monopoly capitalism) took on very specific characterisics.
The State played an enormous role in the economy and in production itself,
thanks to its “Public Industrial Sector”. So in the early 1980s the main
weapons of restructuring were concentrated in the Mitterand State. Including
the weapons the bourgeoisie needed to wage its class war, meaning to restore
the rate of profit and put in place its new neo-liberal model. And it is
clear today that many “left-wing” governments act this way. Most banks and
lending institutions had been nationalized (36 banks, insurance companies
and financial institutions), and the five main industrial groups, including
those responsible for over half of all high tech production, were in the
hands of the State. As well as almost all the sectors involved in new production,
aeronautic and space industries, communications, pure research… and it was
precicely these sectors that were used as models for the most radical restructuring,
from the introduction of new productive watchwords to the total control of
the workplace (work groups, zero default, zero stock, zero spare time…).
It was also here that the most shameless speculation took place, such as
the Credit Lyonnais and AGF scandals. [m ]

It is from the “Public Industrial Sector”, where military production is
almost ubiquitous, that the characteristics of the new business model spread
to other companies, small businesses, and society as a whole. So it is the
State itself that introduced the heightened level of exploitation, that pushed
the capitalist extortion of labour even further to a new level.

Action Directe’s targets were involved in this State activism, in thinktanks
like the OCDE where multinationals and States developed their policies,
in meetings where they thought up imperialist aggressions, in military structures
like the Western European Union and economic structures like the World Bank
and the IMF.

One cannot accuse our organization, or the European guerilla in general,
with having failed to grasp the gravity of the bourgeoisie’s counter-offensive,
and the possible consequences for the international proletariat.

4) What do you think of activism today? What differences do you see,
compared with what was going on at the time of Action Directe and the Red
Army Faction?

When I look at activism over the past few years, it is from a very particular
point of view. My perspective basically consists of two things.

First, the years in prison. My relationship with what is going on today
is necessarily very intellectual. I can’t see, or hardly, the living contributions,
how people actually come together in the different situations and, along
with that, the connections, the emotions… in short, that collective subjectivity,
an essential part of the struggle and of life. I am in a certain sense out
of touch, kept in an involuntary ivory tower where what people are theorising
is more important than what they are doing. Given the way in which I lived
out my own politics, it is not a very comfortable place to evaluate things
from.

Secondly, the “defeat” that we suffered. When I say “we”, I am referring
to far more than just those Action Directe activists who are still in prison.
In 1968 I turned nine years old, so I am not of the generation of ’68. Nevertheless,
I started from that revolutionary surge “there”.

There were many different expressions of the strength of the desire for
liberation and emancipation (5 ) in that surge. They were present throughout the different experiences
of men and women:

The struggles, whether armed or not, in the three continents, which
confronted local dictators supported by the imperialist powers, or else
directly confronted the armed forces of the latter, and the struggles of
the oppressed in the very heart of those imperialist powers.

The struggle of women to act and think critically against all those
institutions where human beings are molded to serve capitalist social relations
and the reproduction of alienating submission…

By the end of the 1980s, this surge was “finished”. In quotation marks
though. It was a defeated at the hands of a bourgeois counter-offensive
that we had seen getting stronger and stronger since the 1970s. In the long
war between exploiters and exploited, a battle was lost. Yet the undeniable
historical break which is the cruel result of this surge ending should not
be confused with being finished once and for all. It is simply a cycle of
struggle which was finished (6 ).

The 1990s, especially the first half, were a nightmare, as we fled from
the naturally oppressive march of history. Our oppressors were in a position
to brag.

Today, that phase is behind us, and over the past years we see the outlines
of what we hope may be a new surge.

Within which there is of course what the media calls the anti-globalization
movement. At first it seemed to me to be monstrously dominated by social-democratic
assumptions. Nostalgia for a “social” State, demands for “better redistribution
of wealth”, which don’t really question the foundations of the system. Indeed,
in this way they limit the hopes of life, pull them down inexorably into
the rut of reformism, all the more senseless given that the decay of this
very system is characterised, amongst other things, by a deep reactionary
impulse (see what I said about the ATTAC and other partisans of global citizenship).
Faced with this, the more radical expressions were put on the defensive,
people dusted off their prayerbooks (whether communist or anarchist) in an
attempt to to counter this falsified and falsifying view of reality. This
was a high point in sect-like behaviour and competition between different
brands in the marketplace of the protest spectacle. Over the last little
while, I have the impression that things have started to get better. The
opening of spaces for critical discussion and actions and all sorts of interesting
things. You’ve got to admit that reality really helps us here. Especially
since September 11th and the pretext that the new “holy crusaders” made of
it.

Already, in light of the series of events that have transpired over the
past months, it is difficult to continue to reject the analysis of imperialist
relations. Globalization is the name of the new form of imperialism. In
the same was that the means of accumulation changes within an “eternal”
capitalist mode of production, the forms of imperialism change. On the one
hand, a clearly visible pyramid with the United States sitting on top; on
the other hand, the utterly reactionary nature of this relationship of forces
where its pretentions of acting on the world seem to be exhausted by the
very spectacle of its powerlessness. It is definitely a very dangerous situation.
For at least two reasons: the impressive attack power that imperialism has
developed and the temptation of miracle-solutions with their scapegoats and
heaven-sent politicians.

But despite myself, despite being well aware of these dangers and what
they mean for the different spaces where life and creativity exist, I am
not convinced that the desire for liberation and emancipation has been destroyed.
A while back I wrote a text [n ] about commitment where I compared it to the old myth of Prometheus, who
stole fire from the gods so that men would no longer be at the mercy of their
blind and arbitrary power. An insurrection where perseverance turned lost
illusions into power for the future. The goal of developing liberatory relations
between people is at the heart of the human adventure. Throughout the ages
its ideological, political and social aspects are expressed differently,
there are often mistakes made about how to realize it, but nevertheless it
is always reborn from its own ashes. It is intimately tied to life, to its
surging forth there where it was least expected.

I am thinking about really a lot of things that all have in common the
desire to change the situation and change it concretely. In a maquiladora
town close to Tijuana, faced with the desertion of the so-called public
authorities from this free trade zone, the women are creating popular education
initiatives, they set up as school with 300 places, and set up a university
of knowledge and philosophy. Recently a Civil Mission for the Protection
of the Palestinian People succeeded, through the presence of internationals,
in allowing Palestinian workers to fix the water-pumps in a camp, abandoned
for 15 days and under fire from Israeli snipers. A film-maker makes a film
with street-children in Daker after having set things up so that his project
helps the kids in the long term. I have chosen “small scale” examples, carried
out in situations where death is never far away. There are countless others.
Day after day, they deconstruct the destruction and the unfavourable balance
of power, even if they are not enough to reverse this balance.

There are more and more people resisting around the world. For those of
us who persist in fighting for the future, having experienced defeat may be
an advantage. We have lived through the exhaustion, the death of an upsurge.
Today, we are seeing and living the budding new life behind that phase.
These situations where the invisible recreate the consciousness of being
the only creative multitude, they reinvent our ability to function while
asking questions.

From various things I have been reading, I am seeing things coming together.
It seems that anticapitalist critiques and actions are once again taking
place. After having thrown out lots of babies with their bathwater, notably
in the way of concepts and grasping reality in a way that serves the oppressed,
we are leaving our defensive positions. Calls that “we want it all and we
want it now” can once again be heard. In any case, nothing else is possible.
What I am saying here is very vague but there are so many realities where
once again we can see global understandings of struggles, resistance and
hope. In any case, it is going better than it was in the mid-nineties.

Of course, the brutality of the steamroller at work puts these initiatives
at risk. And this vulnerability can be exacerbated by our defensive reflexes
to maintain our dogmas when everything is going bad. But this is precisely
why I am so happy with your next question, because you are an anarchist
and I am a communist.

5) You believe the proletariat should take power. Don’t you think that
it should destroy the bourgeoisie and the State to bring about a self-managed
society where the proletariat would no longer be exploited and oppressed?

On the one hand, your question highlights one of the essential differences
between the anarchist and communist labels. On the other hand, in the eyes
of history - notably the last century - it is a caricature of it.

This forces us to return to the essense of the anti-capitalist revolutionary
project, to its attempt to develop a liberation of possibilities and the
emancipation of human beings. From there, we can see what opposes this effort.
I am going to have to refer to Marxist categories but, well, there are anarchists
who use them too, so I hope that this will make them more palatable to you.
So according to a Marxist analysis, there are two contradictions from which
almost everything (7 ) follows:

capital / labour ;

development of productive forces / private appropriation of socially
produced wealth.

They are in any case the basis of the proposition that the exploited and
oppressed class, having nothing to lose but its chains, has the historic
mission to abolish all classes.

It is only following this that we develop different proposals to realize
this “historic mission”, And amongst these proposals, the split between
anarchists and communists regarding organization. What is the means by which
the class can accomplish this mission? What tools should it use in this
struggle? And, when there is a revolutionary upsurge, what structures will
allow it to go even further in tearing apart that which oppresses, and in
building that which liberates? It is around these questions and experiments
that two questions arise:

To conquer State power or to destroy it

“Democratic centralism” or “federalism”

As far as I am concerned, neither the communist nor the anarchist experiments
have produced a model that can simply be referred back to for an answer.
Furthermore, the current absence of a revolutionary surge makes me even more
wary of the temptation of programmes based on what might have been if…

…according to the Trotskyists, if the Staliinists had not taken
power in the former Soviet Union and exerted such control over the communist
movement.

…according to the anarchists, if the communists had not sabotaged
and destroyed their efforts at every turn.

…according to the Stalinists, if after the Second World War
the revisionists had not made nice-nice with the imperialist robber-barons.

And these speculations are only the broad outlines around which the different
splits emerge in the “camp” of the oppressed. One might think it a paradox
that these hyper-politicized divisions are taking place on a profoundly
depolitizied field of action, but it only seems to be a paradox. Having
only lived through one defeat, I cannot compare it to other periods. But
everything I know of this camp makes me believe that there is a connection
between defeat and turning in on oneself, and between surging forward and
the dynamism that creates new possibilities to advance together, this in
itself creating new possibilities.

There are various reasons for this profoundly depoliticized context. There
is definitely the defeat that I have already mentioned. But even more than
this there is out heritage,

“of a century of blood, of massacres and ruin (…) that we barely
dare call ‘modernity’ and that obliged us to renounce all kinds of inevitability,
if they were revolutionary. It is no less true that this pessimism (…) is
itself anchored in a context. It is the reflection of that imperialism and
hopelessness which is globalization, for no matter how much the virtually
positive can show itself, the attention of the clearsighted is held by the
extraordinary power of the negativity inherent in the system (…) For it
is a system and this system, capitalism, has remained the same from the
first up until its imperialist avatars which, through the rhythm of the
many drastic changes that it has brought about and which have changed the
way in which we see the world, have only confirmed its sickness, to the
point of making it urgent (…) to change it. One does not need to look elsewhere
to find something new. And it is radical. No matter how outdated, no matter
how divided for seemingly circumstantial reasons, those who question this
still have the same job to do. There are more and more signs that there will
be, that there are at work convergences, whose programme may not be yet exist
but whose final goal is undeniable.” (8 )

Precisely because of this undeniable final goal, because of its renewed
urgency, when we ask ourselves the “fatal” question - what is to be done?
– we should stop demonizing power. This verb [o ], its action, concerns our relationship to our own lives, what we have
the power to do together. During 1999 a Manifesto of the Alternative Resistance
Network was circulated fairly widely. Of libertarian inspiration, it correctly
put the accent on Resisting Sadness.

“We are living in a period deeply marked by sadness which
is not only tears but is far more so the sadness of powerlessness. Men and
women of our period are living with the certainty that life is so complex
that the only thing we can do, if we don’t want to make it even more complicated,
is to submit to the discipline of economism, of self-interest and selfishness.
Social and individual sadness convinces us that we are not really able to
live a real life and from now on we submit to order and to the discipline
of survival: the tyrant needs sadness because it isolates each of us in
our little virtual and troubling world, just as those who are sad need the
tyrant to justify their sadness.

“We believe that the first step against sadness (which is the form by which
capitalism exists in our lives) is the creation, by various means, of concrete
ties of solidarity. To break the isolation, to create these ties of solidarity
is the beginning of a commitment, of militancy which is not ‘against’ but
which is ‘for’ life and joy through the liberation of power.”

But a little later its libertarian inspiration made it state that resistance
is the negation of a desire for power, for reasons both good and bad.

First of all the bad :

“One hundred and fifty years of revolutions and struggles
have taught us that, contrary to the classic picture, centers of power are
at the same time sites of weakness, even powerlessness. Power is busy managing
things and is unable to change the social structure from the top down if
the real connections at the base do not allow this. So strength is always
separated from power. That is why we separate what is happeneing ‘on the
top’ which is really management, from politics, in the good sense of the
word, which is what is happening ‘on the bottom’.”

This distinction recycles the past years’ ubiquitous slogan of “civil society”.
And it is in a sense the logical conclusion of this slogan that I heard
when a representative of ATTAC (9 ) sold the activity of his brand as a desire to “conquer society”, which
would be a big change from past desires. When you think of all the dangers
revolutionary militants have faced over the past 150 years just to get their
ideas out there, this reversal of priorities makes me laugh – a little bitterly,
but I laugh anyway it is so fucked.

This slogan carries with it another trap, even more dangerous: the central
division would be between “civil society” and the State. What is this civil
society? Who knows! Or more precisely, if we know a little bit of the concepts
that serve the oppressed, we know that before Foucult, Gramsci called our
attention to how such a concept disguises the class realities of our societies.
In any case, in 1999 the MEDEF [p ] launched its “social refoundation”, in the vein of “civil society”. (10 ) A coincidence in the history of slogans?

On the contrary, against this crippling reinterpretation of the history
of the oppressed, the following statement from the same Manifesto deserves
to be quoted :

“From now on, alternative resistance will be strong to
the degree that it will abandon the trap of waiting, that is to say the
classic political plan which always puts off the moment of liberation to
‘tomorrow’, to a little later…”

Quite true, “the path is made by walking” is a well known ‘law’ for all
those who struggle. From a workplace strike to the guerilla, the fact that
you struggle changes the situation. Resistance creates new relationships between
people, new demands too but that is part of what is beautiful. And it is
without a doubt something that will never be understood by those who live
in the sadness of renunciation.

And so, to come back to your question, it is as a communist that I do not
reduce the elaboration of possibilities to a conquest of power by the “proletariat”.
Amongst other reasons because, while the two contradictions I mentioned
earlier have developed to a planetary scale since the time of Marx, this
has not simplified the identity of the famous proletariat. On the contrary.
At the same time as the socialization of productive forces, tied to their
development, has broadened the equally famous “historic mission” (11 ). This does not make it any easier to define the means that will allow
the exploited class to act as a class for itself, a question that Marx and
Bakunin already argued about almost two hundred years ago.

In short, if your question is trying to get me to clarify whether or not
I believe in the transitory stage of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”…
the answer is yes, and it is even one of the reasons why I call myself a
communist. But if, on paper, this stage seems to me to be necessary, amongst
other reaons because of all that we know of the power of the bourgeoisie
to cause trouble to maintain its own dictatorship, don’t ask me what form
this dictatorship will take, in order to work to abolish all classes, and
from there to the withering away of the State as we have known it, as the
tool of one class’s dictatorship over another. The Bolshevik model corresponded
to an upsurge that happened almost a hundred years ago now. I am far too
much a materialist to even want to propose it as an answer. But the model
of the CNT/AIT in Catalonia in 1936, a “desertion” which led to the “vacuum”
being filled by the Catalan bourgeoisie and the Stalinists, doesn’t have
much of a chance of convincing me either… If I manage to draw the correct
questions from these failures, I’ll be very happy…

Joëlle Aubron, Action Directe prisoner July 2002

Those interested in reading more by the
comrades from Action Directe are encouraged to check out the pamphlet Three
Essays by Action Directe Prisoners available from Kersplebedeb. For ordering
information email me at info@kersplebedeb.com

FOOTNOTES :

1) There are an abundance of examples, here are just two: obviously, the
French Communist Party voting full powers to Guy Mollet to pacify Algeria,
but also the attitude of the Cuban Communist Party while the guerilla was
operative. [return to text ]

2) At first, the COLP was just a name used to claim the attack on the Rovigo
prison in January 1982, during which four prisoners, formerly from Prima
Linea, were liberated. This attack was carried out by several small groups
that remained from the armed movement in the Milan area following the decomposition
of Prima Linea. This space around COLP, and then COLP itself, continued
to work on prison issues and would eventually recreate a politico-military
organizational structure. Inside the prisons, some would join the Red Brigades,
others the Red Brigades split which intervened as the Wotta Sitta collective,
others the libertarians, and still others would disasssociate themselves.
[return to text ]

3) According to Alain Ménargues, a Radio-France reporter in Beirut
from 1982 to 1995, the involvement of the Israeli armed forced in these
massacres went far beyond passive complicity. The conclusions of the official
Israeli inquiry, made puiblic in February 1983, went out of their way to
note the personal responsibility of Sharon in carrying out the massacres.
Now, in a to-be published book, Alain Ménargues provides evidence
that an Insraeli commando unit was present. This unit was the first to enter
the camps encircled by the army. With a list of 120 names, this unit carried
out 63 summary executions against these Palestinian civilians, lawyers, doctors,
teachers and nurses. It is only after this that a second and then a third
wave of Lebanese killers entered. [return to
text ]

4) Meaning “real existing socialism”. Whatever the failures of this model
in abolishing classes, and thus abolishing exploitative and oppressive relationships,
its existence contributed to democratizing the imperialist stage, which
is by its very nature a stage of decay and thus of reaction. It is no coincidence
that the demise of this model led to further decay. The political crisis,
which was illustrated by the recent elections amongst other things, is undeniably
a part of this decay. [return to text ]

5) Of course, “liberation” and “emancipation” are synonyms. Nevertheless,
by occasionally using the word “emancipation”, I am trying to go back to
a major distinction. “All emancipation is a reduction of the human world
and relationships to man himself. Political emancipation is the reduction
of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society […] and, on the other
hand, to a citizen […] only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own
powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power
from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation
have been accomplished.” (Marx, On the Jewish Question) So liberation from
that which oppresses works towards emancipation, understood as the opposite
of alienation. This project cannot just be a search for paradise lost, human
liberation and emancipation both make up a future in constant construction,
the “from this day on”s leading to better possible tomorrows. [return to text ]

6) In 1998 we wrote :

“As for current and future struggles, the undeniable
historic break at the end of the 1980s is a crucial factor that one must
take into account.

“That said it is equally important to point out that there is nothing extraordinary
or cataclysmic to noting that a cycle of struggle has come to an end. Similar
situations have already happened at least two or three times over the past
century. Since the barricades at the Paris Commune, the revolutionary tradition
on this continent has had to evolve, experiment, taste defeat and recognize
it as such, and then set out once again ‘to storm the heavens’.

“It is worth dwelling on this evolution, made up of breaks and defeats
ranging from the time of the old conspiratorial and insurrectionary tactics
of the 19th century to the construction of large parties and unions, from
the inability of these to oppose the butchery of the First World War to
the Third International and the communist parties, from the latter’s post-war
collaboration with the bourgeois system to the new revolutionary wave that
broke with the mantras of modern revisionism.

“For today, what we want to retain from this can already be summarized
by something obvious. Capitalism transforms itself by stages and, with these,
cycles of struggle: revolutionary forms and means change as ‘the historic
effect of the class struggle.’”

7) Not everything, just almost, and it is important because the historical
processes and political and social formations within which they reveal themselves
make me think of what we are beginning to know about how the human brain
works : matter, nothing but matter, but also chemistry from which the subjective
participates, and so emotions in social, cultural and individual interactions.
[return to text ]

9) I am targeting ATTAC because, in the journalistic construction that
passes for public debate, this brand name has been given the job of opposition.
But this discourse in which the past actions of those who wanted to change
society are laughed at, are reduced to the story told by the victors, is
widely propagated. [return to text ]

11) To give just one example of this: the fact that, if the productive
forces are socialized, this socialization means that the collective appropriation
of wealth takes into account the limits imposed by Ecology. Without which
this wealth is not actually wealth, that is to say it buries the future
and wastes the present. [return to text ]

Explanatory Notes

the following notes were added by the
translater to provide some context and explanation for those not well-versed
in the political context of Action Directe's activity

[a1] The term “metropoles” refers to imperialist countries. One could also
use the term “First World”. [return to text ]

[a] In 1973 workers took over the bankrupt Lip watch factory in Besançon,
France, and started running it for themselves. This experiment in self-management
attracted a lot of attention from various left-wing groups. [ return to text ]

[b] A reference to a popular French childrens’ cartoon, where the wicked
buffoon Grand Vizier Iznogoud schemes to depose and replace the king. [return to text ]

[c] Many revolutionaries and intellectuals saw the ruling class as carrying
out preventive counter-revolution in response to the challenge of the 1960s
movements. The term “preventive counter-revolution” was used by Herbert
Marcuse in particular to describe repressive policies that try to prevent
even the possibility of revolution. It should be noted that this is different
from what radicals had termed “preventive counter-revolution” a few decades
earlier, by which they meant fascism. [return to text ]

[e] Translated means “Proletarian Left”. This was a theoretical magazine
published by the group of the same name in Milan. This group grew
out of the militant worker-student movement, and in turn it was from this
group that the Red Brigades emerged. [return to text ]

[f] The three continents being South America, Africa and Asia. More usually
one would refer to the “Third World”, or perhaps the “global south”.
[return to text ]

[g] Queer French playright Jean Genet made a distinction between “brutality”,
which he saw as state-sponsored, and violence, which he saw as a legitimate
weapon in the hands of the oppressed. When in 1977 he extended his distinction
between bad brutality and good violence to a defense of the Red Army Faction
in Germany, it created a furor against him across Europe. From then until
his death in 1986, he remained isolated from white French society, his closest
friends being Palestinians and his Moroccan lover. [ return to text ]

[h] ATTAC stands for Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions
for the Aid of Citizens. It is a network of groups against neo-liberalism
and for ”democratic control of financial markets and their institutions”.
Social-democratic and within the orbit of the newspaper le Monde Diplomatique,
it is particularly active in France. [return
to text ]

[i] The RAF was in the habit of naming its commando groups after martyred
revolutionaries. Khaled Aker was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine–General Command who was killed on November 25, 1987 during
an attack on an IDF base in the north of Israel. [ return to text ]

[j] The “periphery” refers to colonies and neo-colonies ; one might also
say the “Third World”. [return to text ]

[k] Besse was Director General of the state-owned Renault car company since
January 1985. He was credited with Renault making a profit for the first
time in years – a feat he managed by laying off 21,000 workers. On November
17th 1986, Action Directe’s Pierre Overney Commando (named after a Maoist
militant killed by a Renault factory guard) rode up on a motorcycle as Besse
emerged from his chauffeur-driven car – he was shot in the head and chest
and died where he fell on the pavement. [return
to text ]

[l] On April 15th 1986 Action Directe’s Christos Kassimis Commando attacked
Guy Brana, the vice-president of the CNPF (the French employers’ association)
and the Director General of the arms branch of the Thomson multinational.
[return to text ]

[m] In September 1992, state-owned Credit Lyonnais was placed under administrative
control by the French finance ministry as it became clear that the bank’s
loan and investment portfolios contained massive unrealised losses, as a
result of large loans and equity stakes in various businesses. While the
French government safeguarded the savings of the banks’ eight million depositors,
it meant bailing it out to the tune of billions of francs – over $17 billion
US dollars worth. [return to text ]

[o] The French word for power is “pouvour” – it is both a noun and a verb
which means “to be able to”. Thus, in French the same word for “power” also
means “ability”. [return to text ]

[p] The MEDEF is the French Business Movemenet, an employers’ organization.
[return to text ]

This interview was carried out by the anarcho-punk webzine Future Noir ( http://futurenoir.propagande.org ) over the period 2002-2003. It was translated from French to English by
Kersplebedeb. Footnotes with numbers are from the original, footnotes with
letters in square parentheses are for context, and provided by Kersplebedeb.